This website documents the development of the Karnata Dravida “architectural language” by analyzing close to 100 temples dating from 600 to 1300 CE. Its more than 600 slides, photographs, diagrams and 700 pages of commentary document the major ecclesiastical monuments of the Early Chalukya, Later Chalukya and Hoysala dynasties in Karnataka.
100 Karnataka Temples forms a pendant or parallel to an earlier website: 40 Khmer Temples (www.templemountains.org) tracing the course of a second, major, comtemporaneous tradition of Hindu temple construction comprising almost all extant remains of the Khmer Empire. “Karnataka/ Khmer: An Architectural Encounter,” the first essay to attempt to compare these two discrete but equally distinguished interpretations of the “temple mountain” metaphor, follows this introduction.
100 Karnataka Temples is not conceived as a conventional monograph or historical overview of classic Karnatakan architecture across this seminal period. Rather it is designed as an introduction and guide to each of the 100 temples it documents. Therefore each slide is accompanied by enough commentary to allow it to be appreciated individually (resulting in frequent, mind-numbing repetition.)
1) Click on the location of that temple among the twenty-eight “albums” or “site surveys” listed towards the base of the navigation panel.
2) This will lead to a page of thumbnails of all the slides of all the temples at that site in the order in which they appear in that album/site survey. (That site’s temples are also listed at the top of each thumbnails page.)
3) Click on the first or “cover” thumbnail, then arrow forward through the slides of that album/site survey.
4) Or click on any individual thumbnail to go directly to it; then arrow forward or back from it to view the remainder of that survey.
5 ) To view a slide in the survey of a different site, click on that location among the sites/albums listed on the navigation panel.
6) To “hide” the comments panel and view the slide in full-screen mode, click on the square with highlighted corners at the upper right of each slide; to restore the panel, click the same icon again.
7) To zoom in on a detail of a slide, click on the “magnifying glass” icon at the upper right; then drag the cursor to focus on the desired part of the screen.
8) To scroll up or down through a slide’s “comments panel,” move the slider beside that commentary; the slide itself will not move, only the text.
No pretense to academic rigor has been made in matters of orthography and terminology. The most precise method of transliteration, the IPA, is also the most opaque for the general reader. Other systems suffer from the vagaries of history – the legacy of colonialism and more recently the demands of nationalism; as a result, currently preferred spellings can also be the most difficult to recognize. An effort has been made to be at least consistent to the site’s idiosyncratic choices.
The canonical Indian architectural texts or vastu shastras, are notably reticent with regard to nomenclature. Nagara (Northern Indian) and Dravida (Southern Indian) terminology inevitably have been applied to each other. Where they are silent recourse has been had to the familiar, if inaccurate, vocabulary of western architecture. Rather than arbitrarily privileging one inexact term over another, a macaronic pidgen of associated terms has generally been employed in the hope they may together approximate a more precise reading.
Sanskrit, Kannada and Khmer terms are italicized to distinguish them easily from their European counterparts and to draw attention to an unfamiliar but rich architectural vocabulary. Detailed definitions of these terms are readily available from online glossaries, Wikipedia entries and dictionaries of Hindu terms.
The copious glosses accompanying the nearly 1000 slides on these two websites are “notes” and “sketches” compiled from a desultory study of their subjects. Their author conspicuously lacks the formal training in architecture, Hinduism and South and Southeast Asian Studies necessary to provide academically authoritative, reliable commentaries. They suffer from the misinterpretations, imprecisions and inessential details attendant on any such autodidactic undertaking. It is, nonetheless, hoped they provide enough helpful background, useful pointers and intriguing suggestions for the sites’ users to pursue their own independnt study of these remarkable monuments with the diligence they deserve.
To conclude where one should probably have begun, 100 Karnataka Temples and 40 Khmer Temples are intended to make accessible to a broader public the seminal, analytic framework developed in Prof. Adam Hardy’s Indian Temple Architecture – Form and Transformation: The Karnata Dravida Tradition (Abhinav Publications, New Delhi, 1995). and extensive subsequent work. They attempt to apply his methods to two related, but radically divergent traditions, of Hindu architecture which more circumspect commentators have prudently avoided. Traduttore, traditore; this problematic comparison lapses from the “flattery of imitation” into parody and impudence.
The sites are exculpated from any imputation of plagiarism, if only because they so often misconstrue Prof. Hardy’s scholarly insights and misapply his rigorous terminology. It should be unnecessary to add that Prof. Hardy neither sanctioned, reviewed nor had any prior knowledge of this dubious undertaking. Nonetheless, his intelligence imbues, in however distorted form, every page and should inspire conscientious users to a more serious engagement with his work.